A bit of bas-relief left over from Kizzuwatna. Does anybody know the story that the pictures mean to tell? I admit I don’t.
If you’re not an ancient history nut like me, you’ve probably never heard of Kizzuwatna. I’m only writing about it because it had such a cool name, and because I ran out of gas this afternoon and just can’t do any more nooze.
Asia Minor, now Turkey, was a happenin’ place in the Bronze Age. In time, most of it was drawn into the Hittite Empire. Sometimes the Hittites ruled Kizzuwatna, sometimes they didn’t. It seems the people of Kizzuwatna knew who was boss and behaved accordingly.
Located in southeast Asia Minor, in the elbow of the eastern Mediterranean, Kizzuwatna featured silver mines and very convenient trade routes. It all went up in smoke sometime after 1200 B.C., when the Sea Peoples collapsed the Hittite Empire and everywhere else they could get their hands on. Kizzuwatna then disappears from history.
(Don’t ask about the Sea Peoples. An answer would require more energy than I’ve got just now.)
Besides the cool name, the coming and going of Kizzuwatna impresses me with the sheer weight of history. Really, we only know bits and pieces of what happened. Asia Minor had some wild and woolly times in the Bronze Age, petty kingdoms galore, armed invasions from every direction on the map… and the Trojan War.
Try to cast your mind back to, say, 1500 B.C. Try to enter that world.
It’s not so easy, is it?